Telephone customers oftentimes have telephone station equipment consisting of telephone sets with ones of the telephone sets connected with multiple telephone lines so that a customer using a telephone set may originate or answer a telephone call on any of the telephone lines. In other telephone set configurations, the customer may want various ones of the telephone lines coupled with all or selected ones of the telephone sets. In addition, the customer may also want telephone lines to be assigned various features available at a telephone switching office serving the customer telephone lines such as call forwarding, call waiting, call transfer, ring selection and others. A customer may also request that various ones of the telephone sets be equipped with key buttons that provide button features such as privacy, speed calling, call hold and others. Such telephone station equipment is sometimes called key telephone systems and a customer key telephone system may comprise a combination of single, six, ten, thirty or more key button telephone sets.
A customer may, from time to time, want to add or remove telephone lines coupled with various telephone sets. In addition, a customer may want to add or delete telephone lines, features and directory numbers to various ones of the telephone sets and to add, delete or rearrange various features associated with each button of the customer's telephone sets. Key telephone management systems are currently available that enable customers to control and implement changes to customer key telephone systems served by a telephone switching system.
The key telephone management system apparatus in interaction with customers enable the customers to select key telephone button and line features and control the telephone switching system to assign the customer selected button and line features to the customer telephone sets.
A problem arises in that a key telephone management system requires that a customer using the system must prepare a set of program instructions that control the operation of the system to implement the customer changes. This requirement makes it necessary that the customer be trained in the operation of program fundamentals in order that the customer can write a set of program instructions required to implement the selected button and line features for each telephone set that is in the customer key telephone system. A need exists for apparatus and a method of operating the apparatus for enabling a customer to implement the changes for each customer telephone set without the need to be trained in a specific program language and without the need for a customer to write a unique set of program instructions to implement a change for each customer telephone set.